http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/index.html

Originally, as I made reference to in my previous post, I had settled on Eclipse since it provided more support for C++ than Visual Studio, (and with the added bonus of not being restricted to one platform and set of languages). Eclipse is pretty good, but in order to get everything situated the way I wanted, it would have required an inordinate amount of time setting up ‘perspectives’ and ‘views’ and installing dozens of plugins. Eclipse is certainly a good IDE, but it’s far from intuitive or user (developer?) friendly. You kind of get the sense that Eclipse is too modular, too open of a framework. Others have articulated this point better than I can, so check out the links in the previous blog post.

So where did I turn? Well, I had been playing around with NetBeans a couple of months back, and it’s the other giant in the world of IDE’s. I had never really dug too deep into it until this week, but I’m very impressed, to the point where I chose to try and mold it into my ‘perfect’ dev environment. NetBeans is centered around being powerful, yet still simple to use. The interfaces have less clutter than other IDE’s, and there is more ‘out-of-the-box’ as well. Without any special configuration, NetBeans has full intellisense, active syntax/semantic checking, refactoring, etc for Java, C, C++, Python, PHP, Javascript, Ruby (and Rails), and a variety of web technologies. Also included out of the box is the ability to have database projects for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle, DB2, and ODBC connections. To top it off, Subversion, CVS, and Murcurial are integrated right into the IDE. Any items not directly included in that mammoth list of supported things can be added via the plugin interface, which is as simple as selecting them from a repository GUI.

Very impressed with NetBeans. It is available for most platforms over at www.netbeans.org.

I finished up the windows SFTP client I was writing in C# this week, and have been stress testing it with varying degrees of data. During the testing I encountered an interesting problem with one of the windows controls; It turns out the TreeView control, which contains TreeNode objects, can only handle X number of nodes before it simply locks the UI up. Additionally, even if one were to populate the TreeView with number of nodes = X-1, there is a giant performance hit during the initial population routine. The solution?

public FormConstructor()
{
    TreeView myTreeView = new TreeView();
    myTreeView.Fill();
}
 
public void Fill()
{
    myTreeView.Hide();
    myTreeView.Nodes = Populate();
    myTreeView.Show();
}

This code is of course simplified to illustrate the point: If you hide the control before populating it, and then show it after populating it, the population happens almost instantaneously, regardless of how many node you add (given the limit of X number of nodes maximum of course). The difference the user is inconsequential, since the hide/show happens within a fraction of a second. The reasoning behind this, I suspect, has something to do with the control having to be re-drawn or re-created with each node addition.

So, moving on to a new subject; Susanna has been enjoying Team Fortress 2 a lot lately, with the interesting side note that she is running it via Wine, on Ubuntu, rather than the native Windows environment. This seems to work pretty good, with no major issues, except that the video card in her computer was an ATI X1550, which is an older ATI card. ATI cards have had a long history of being absoloutely terrible under Linux, due to the atrocious drivers that have been written for them, and Susanna experienced this in the form of occasional system freezes every 30-45 minutes or so. So, today we swapped out another video card I have, which isn’t really any different in terms of performance, but is an NVidia 7600GS, which has infinitely better driver support, and hopefully will solve the lock-up issues.

Until next time.

1. My desire to know everything about computers, networks, and security, and what I actually know
2. In that context, what X is needed to know before learning Y

I want to know all there is to know in these areas, and in thinking about this desire, I realize that there are items that I don’t know, that I need to know to continue. Examples of things that I do not know, which I feel I need to know are:

1. Kernel and Device/Driver programming
2. Languages: C#, C++, .NET, ASP, Python, Ruby

I know that amongst computer science students I’m not alone in this. Perhaps I am on track with my education, but even if I were to finish out my 4 year degree (which I am nearly done with), I would only solve the C#/.NET and abstract portions of Kernel programming.

Thus I have begun learning C++ outside of traditional class, as a start to finish out these items. I haven’t yet come across any concepts in C++ that are different from C, be it syntax or concept, but I imagine the more I read I will.

I also want to start getting deeper into operating systems and the kernel. For example,

• In what format is the data from your keyboard in when it is sent from key?
• It is sent through the wire, and various hardware; where does it go along its path?
• How does it reach the operating system, and in what format is the data arriving?
• What in the operating system is picking it up?
• What really is a driver, on a more specific level, rather than just an abstract “bit of code that makes the hardware work” ?

If you really think about it, you are never taught such things in a 4 year computer science education (At least I don’t think you do. Certainly not where I go.) So it’s not as if I feel I am any less educated than my classmates, but these are definitely things I need to know.

A lot of googling is in store.

I have no further thoughts on this.

Ubuntu’s Macbook Pro Triple Boot Guide

Say you’ve just finished installing all 3 operating systems via one of these tutorials, and you go to check to make sure all is well by booting each of them.

• Mac OS X? Check.
• Ubuntu(or your favorite distribution)? Check.
• Windows? (insert price-is-right losing soundbyte here).

So Windows tells you “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME” in the all to familiar BSOD. What to do? Well, basically when you install 3 OS’s in a triple boot environment, nearly every tutorial (with good reason) tells you to install in this order: Mac OS X, Windows, Linux. This is fine, but the problem is most of the tutorials have you tuck the Linux partition in between the Mac OS X and Windows ones on the disk. This causes a problem, because in c:\boot.ini, Windows is looking for partition #X. You need to update both partition references in this file by incrementing the number by 1. This solves the problem.